Finale NotePad® 2006 -- Review and Tutorial

I decided to write a procedure for notating a song in Finale Notepad for
you. I discovered a few things on the way I'd like to share with you. Let
me know, if you would like me to review other free composition tools and
possibly write up additional procedures!

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To add instruments to your document, select an instrument family,
the specific instrument(s), and then click the Add button. Added instruments
will appear in the rightmost field on the screen, under which you
can specify score order.

I selected piano and voice. You can choose whichever instruments
you like. Voice is in the chorus family. Maybe Finale should consider
labeling the instrument families. The white fields in the dialog box,
from left to right, would then be labeled: family, instrument,
and document or "document list."

Click Next.

The third page of the Document Setup Wizard appears.

The outlines in this dialog box could be used in Page 1 of the
Document Setup Wizard, to delineate the page size and orientation
information...just a comment!

Select your time and key signatures.

If you arent sure which time or key signature your piece is in,
youll want to check back here for an online course.

Click Next.

Your document is ready!

Your document includes the appropriate instruments (in my case, piano
and voice), and the title, composer, and copyright information are
nicely placed on the page.

Input your notes...

I noticed that there is no way to get notes into Finale Notepad via
a MIDI keyboard. In Finale's production software, one can use a tool called
the "Speedy Entry Tool" to input notes from a keyboard. The
production software also has something called "Hyperscribe,"
which allows for live entry of MIDI notes.

At first, I thought, oh, forget it, I wont enter any keyboard
music, but then I figured you all out there might need to write something
for keyboard...so I pressed on...

To gain a better understanding of how to input notes into Finale Notepad,
I suggest going through the first tutorial in the online help.

Select Help | Tutorials

Finale NotePad 2006 online help appears

You can skip the first part of the tutorial, since it looks like
I covered a bit of the same material that Finale did -- however, I was
able to make some running commentary on the way, in particular regarding
potential improvements to the design of the Document Setup Wizard.

Pay particular attetion to the section in the tutorial about the "Simple
Entry Caret."

You can search for "Simple Entry Caret" in the online help
using the Help Index as below.

You can also type "Simple Entry Caret" into the search function
of the online help as below.

Not bad, huh? By pressing the Right arrow, you get a nifty entry
tool that makes using NotePad a little more user friendly than it would
otherwise be...I love saving clicks and saving time...an area in which,
in my opinion, Finale's commercial software could greatly improve.

So, now you know how to enter notes.

I like it that the "active" note is displayed in purple, and
that I can press delete to make the "active note" disappear.
The triplet tool seems to work well, and it can be quickly implemented,
so we're actually doing pretty well...

I'm going to go ahead and continue with my real-world example...the
song "Soldier."

Hmmm...let's take a closer look...

See how the low e is black and the e below middle c is red? Thats because
I input the low e into Layer 1. I entered the higher e into Layer 2.
Do you see anything wrong with the notation? If not, youll definitely
want to check back for courses and find some music notation resources.

The red stems are pointing downward, which, if I want to make my piano
score look professional, will need to point upward. How do I do that?

Finales production software has a tool that allows you to flip the direction
of stems. FinaleNotepad, as far as I can tell, does not.

Ahh...I searched the online help and found...

Note that the layer 1 notes all have flipped stems up. Layer 2 notes
are automatically entered with stems down. Layer 3 has stems up and
Layer 4 has stems down.

Is that true? Ill run a test!

OK, the different colors represent different layers, and the stems
are don't seem to be behaving correctly. Ive found the following statement
in the online help:

Each layer flips its stems up or down automatically, to help distinguish
the multiple voices.

Yet, only some of the voices are flipping automatically the way the
help suggests. Ive tried selecting all and choosing View | Redraw
Screen, but I see no change in the display.

For now, it looks like the "layers" might be best understood
as "voices."

Layer
1 = Soprano Layer
2 = Alto Layer
3 = Tenor Layer
4 = Bass

Yet, the only layers that seem to be working properly are layers 1 and
2. The stems in which I used layers 3 and 4 don't seem to be flipping
as promised.

Also, you can set the layer colors to be what you like in the commercial
version of Finale...not sure about that in NotePad...I'll check on that.

Pretty decent review for NotePad so far, albeit with glitches...I'll
continue with this procedure at a later date...Im off to Finales forums
to see what I can do for you!

Your story will appear on a Web page exactly the way you enter it here. You can wrap a word in square brackets to make it appear bold. For example [my story] would show as my story on the Web page containing your story.

TIP: Since most people scan Web pages, include your best thoughts in your first paragraph.

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